Life in the Fast Lane

Oops, So I believe I said in my last post that I would update again from Kauai, but now here I am, with 2 days and 1 night left of my trip back to the States, and I'm only just getting around to posting. Typical me!

I have a ton of stuff to write about and not much time to write it today since I still have to look for work pants and shoes to bring back with me and stock up on a few more food products MOTH and I will be desperate for as soon as we get back to Aus where they are either a) not available or b) god awful expensive and then I should clean the guest room since my parents have people coming to stay with them a few days after we leave.

Since I keep reading on people's Facebook statuses how cold and miserable it is in NSW already and since high bill season is about to start at my work, where I know I will spend multiple 8 hour shifts getting yelled at and verbally abused by customers, reminiscing on my vacation through blog posts will be a very nice distraction in the coming weeks.

Here are some of the topics I hope to have posts up about shortly:

Our amazing, wonderful, fabulous, exquisite, relaxing, and fun trip to Kauai

Our time in San Francisco, including meeting our fabulous wedding photographer

The time I got ripped off by some guy at a gas station and got in to a verbal confrontation with him

Wedding plans including our wedding planner, our menu, and our location

How MOTH Dude upgraded my engagement ring in a very BIG way

Anyway, I'm off to start my errands. Wish me safe flying thoughts and a speedy recovery from my jet lag since I am hitting the ground running and starting back to work on Monday!

One More Day to Leave it All Behind To Go Where You Have Never Even Tried

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So welcome back to the roller coaster that is my mind and my emotions. Today you find me in a good mood and my spirits high. I am on the final day of a 5 day long weekend and I only have 3 more days left at work before I am off for a whole month!

MOTH Dude and I have spent the weekend cleaning, doing laundry, gardening, visiting friends and family and catching up on much needed sleep and our favorite TV shows.

We are both nearly giddy at the thought of our upcoming travel plans! Saturday we are having a van pick us up and then we are off to SYD to catch our JetStar flight to Honolulu. We arrive at about 6:30am Saturday morning where we will head through customs and then catch a flight to Kauai where we will meet up with my Mom and Dad. From there we will head to our favorite condo ever (see image above, it's called Whalers Cove and it's in Poipu) and spend 8 days snorkeling, tanning, stand up paddle boarding, and hanging out.

After that we head to San Francisco for a few days where we plan on walking over the GG Bridge again, eating at our favorite restaurants, doing some shopping, meeting with a potential wedding photographer, and hitting up an SF Giants baseball game-MOTH's first ever!

After San Francisco, we will head down to Santa Cruz to hang out, visit potential wedding spots, meet our wedding coordinator, hang with some of my parents' really fun and nice neighbors, beach walk, meet other potential wedding vendors, and eat at all of our favorite places. Bun and Markie may also come up for a visit so we can show them around and so that they can finally experience staying in the awesome pool house at Mom and Dad's.

We are also planning on a very quick road trip down to Orange County to meet with our other potential wedding photographers, as well as to visit my Gma and ask my Godfather to be our wedding officiant!

We have so much to do in the three weeks we will be back in California and I really want to get as much wedding stuff nailed down as possible because it may be the last time we/MOTH Dude will be there before the wedding (eeeek!). I'm sure we will be coming back from our trip as worn out as when we left, but in a good way. I can't wait to meet all the people who are potentially going to make our wedding day so special. I also can't wait to see how much all of this is going to cost us. I am sure we are in for some sticker shock!

I really wish Nae could be with us in Kauai and for wedding planning since she's my Maid of Honor (or as I like to call her, the Maid of Horror since she thinks I'm going to be a bridezilla, haha), but she is swamped with tracking sharks and working on her dissertation so I am hoping that MOTH Dude and I (or at least I) can get back at Christmas time when she is planning on a visit.

In other news, my sister who is not really my sister, aka the Camp Counselor is going to be watching the pets while we are in Kauai. She is then leaving with her real family for a trip to Australia the day after we get in to Santa Cruz and as (bad) luck would have it, she'll be arriving back to the U.S. on the day that MOTH and I arrive back to Sydney! I can't believe the timing of it!

Stay tuned for all the exciting (at least to me) updates and photos.

Well How Do You Do, I'm the Language Police

I know that I use parenthesis and run on sentences far too often so I'm probably not in the best position to judge other's writing, grammar, punctuation, or pronunciation, but Come On! You guys are killing me! I've heard two different people at work say "pacifically" or "pacifics"....they aren't talking about someone doing something calmly and they aren't talking about two parts of the Pacific Ocean; what they are trying to say is Specifically and Specifics. Whenever I hear it, my hackles rise and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from correcting them. The worse part is, they won't say it once. They will get on a role and use the word/s in their conversation in every other sentence. That's how I've been able to ascertain I didn't just mishear the word to begin with. They really like to remind me/the customer that they are using the word incorrectly!

Alright, take out your pens and proofread my posting now. Hahaha, oh man, you all must hate me at this point-no new entries to read for nearly a month and then I come on with a quick rant about pronunciation.

My apologies!

I guess I could leave you with a quick run down of what has been going on with me since my houseboat trip:

-My Christmas was not bad. We had a busy day going to different family members' houses and baking, but it didn't feel like Christmas so Nae texted me at 4:15 on real Christmas morning and I got to watch on the webcam as everyone opened their presents back home. My family sent us two different packages filled with some basic necessities we were running low on like Mexican food stuff and underwear (hahaha, we are spoiled! MOTH only wears Old Navy ones now and I only wear American Eagle...tmi??)

-We went nuts at the Boxing Day sale, but with our engagement present gift cards, we ended up getting a lot of stuff without being out of pocket (except for the bed and dryer we bought!)

-I got told my last week of annual leave got rejected so it's kind of thrown a spanner in the works for our trip to CA to wedding plan and visit family and friends, but I'm working on some solutions.

-Nae is leaving at the end of the month for her 2 year trip to South Africa to study sharks and I won't get to see her before she goes...pretty devastated! She has made up for it a little by sending us an 18 month calendar that is all about her that is pretty hilarious though.

-I got tentatively diagnosed with not full blown Celiac Disease but a "sensitivity" to gluten that the doctor thinks is causing all my stomach problems and headaches so I've started a gluten free diet (as of Tuesday) to see if a month of being gluten free cures me.

-We spent New Years with the majority of our friends at a pretty town called Forster about 3 hours north of where we live. We fished, we swam off of sand bars, MOTH Dude caught and then lost a fish, we tooled around on the boat, we watched fireworks, we walked...good times and very, very strange to be sweating on New Year's Eve!

-We've decided to start our trip back to the States with a stop over to Kauai with my parents (MOTH's can't make it due to MOTH Dad needing some intense shoulder surgery that he is hoping will be scheduled finally in April) and I just booked the flights from Kauai to Oakland tonight!

Mele Kalikimaka

We met S and his family in Kauai at the airport. They had already been there a few hours. We put my name on their rental car so that I could drive them around. We drove the 30 minutes to the house we were staying in and it was beautiful! We had an ocean view over to our favorite beach in Poipu. The parents each had their own bedroom suites upstairs, plus the kitchen, a tv room, and an extra bathroom. Downstairs, S, D (S’s brother), Nae and I had a bathroom, two bedrooms, a tv area, an outdoor shower, and an air hockey table. S, D, Nae, and I all got in to our bathing suits and wanted to body surf. I told D to bring his fins as it was a pretty rough spot to get out at and there were tons of submerged rocks. He said, “Nah, I’ll be right” As soon as he got in to the water, he decided to run back and get his fins. That night we cooked fish tacos ( a first for S’s family) at home and it was so nice to see my parents get along and get along well with S’s. The next morning we got up and went for a snorkel. Nae told us to dive under water and stay there and listen. We could hear humpbacks singing to each other, Magic! We then went back home and got dressed and headed out to see the “Grand Canyon of Hawaii” Waimea. Over the week we drove over the whole island. We did lots of snorkeling and saw tons of whales, though not while we were in the water. S and his family took a helicopter trip around the island. We went to a luau where I got very drunk on mai tais, though I’m a light weight and no one else did. When we got back to the house, D, dressed up in a hula girl costume his girlfriend had gotten him. We saw Spouting Horn, went to Hanalei, and to Ke’e beach. My mom and S’s Mom saw Pierce Brosnan riding by on a bike near Princeville, I guess he has a house there. The boys and Nae went for a surf. S and I managed to get a date night in by just ourselves one night and that was special and nice to be alone for a bit just to dissect how it was all going. On our last night together, my parents took us all to the Beach House restaurant (http://www.the-beach-house.com/). It was a great meal and the perfect ending to being in Kauai together. The next day Mom and Dad took off to go back home and S’s family, Nae and I headed over to Oahu. While there we did touristy stuff like go to Cheeseburger in Paradise, the outdoor markets, and just hang out along Waikiki Beach. We also hit up the zoo, which was pretty cool and pretty big for being right in the city, and then ran in to a parade for the U of H football team who had just won some championship or something. A guy from my high school class was the quarterback which would’ve been funny to see him, but he wasn’t there. The next day we rented a car and I drove us all to the North Shore. The waves were huge! It was so cool to be there and see waves like that. We even saw Bun’s Mom’s house which overlooks Sunset Beach. S, Nae and I got Mexican for lunch and S’s family decided they weren’t that adventurous (remember, Mexican is like nonexistent in Oz, which sucks for me because I was raised by a Mexican nanny, my Mom #2, and Mexican food was like the staple of my diet) so they got burgers or pizza. Nae was coming down with bronchitis or pneumonia or something at this point and was not feeling well/in a good mood for our last night in Hawaii. She kicked S out of our room fairly early so she could get some sleep. The next morning we were up and out by like 5 to drop S’s family at the airport. Nae and I then hit up Denny’s til it was time to return the car and catch a flight back to Kauai then back to Orange County.
I had a garage sale when I got home and made bank. The house was looking really good, I thought, after my friend Chiara, from grade school had helped me with some new bedding and stuff to freshen up the inside.